Cryptozoology is the investigation of animals not yet recognized by science, but whose existence is hinted at by eye witness accounts, photos, or traces. I provided a major review of Australian cryptozoology in my 1996 book, "Bunyips and Bigfoots". This blog aims to continue reporting on that research.
However, initially, I intend to provide a service of translating into English a number of foreign language accounts from around the world.

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Wednesday, 22 February 2017

If you look at a map of Pakistan, you will see, in the far north, a sliver of land squeezed between Afghanistan and Kashmir, with Tajikistan to the north. This is the district, and former kingdom of Chitral, and it is a world apart from the hot, level plains of the Indus Valley, where most of Pakistan lives. They even speak a different language, and the mountainous terrain is essentially the western extension of the Himalayas. Into this forgotten land, in 1988 and 1990, came the Catalan born French zoologist, Jordi Magraner in search of evidence for the bar manu, the local equivalent of the Abominable Snowman. Speaking the local language himself, he interviewed a large number of people, and came back with 27 testimonies of encounters with the legendary beast. Five years ago I published a translation of his report. It turns out, however, that this was merely a preliminary report. A more detailed docuement, amounting to 84 pages, can be found at here in PDF form. In view of its length, I have no intention of translating the whole document. Moreover, I consider the original report presented sufficient details about the environment, the animal's appearance, and its location in time and space. However, there is one addition which is important. The full report contains far more eyewitness accounts than the three which illustrated the earlier report. I have therefore decided to translate that section. Read it, and then ask whether you any longer doubt the existence of an unknown primate in the Himalayas. Note: French and Russian investigators into unknown bipedal primates tend to call them "relic hominids". In normal scientific parlance, however, hominids refers to the group comprising humans, the great apes, and our extinct relatives. It is far from clear where the "relic hominids" fit into the scheme.

The Possum Book

I am pleased to provide a link to a website of a friend of mine, Robyn Tracey, who has written a fascinating story about her dealings with brush-tailed possums in the outer suburbs of Sydney. You can download the book for free, or read it on the site. Go to: The Possum Book.